In 2012, only a little over half the seniors in Minneapolis Public Schools had graduated in 4 years. Seniors who didn’t graduate faced the problem of making up credits for failed classes. Although schools have their own programs to help students graduate on time, next year, something will change.

The district is trying to bring in new ways for students to make up their credits. Student graduation rates, and the success rate of Area Learning Center (ALC) showed district officials that they needed to come up with a better option for credit recovery. Jody Schieffer, coordinator of credit recovery across the district, stated that “ALC isn’t meeting the needs of students with different learning styles, and it’s boring.”

However, ALC is the most popular credit recovery option at South. “I encourage students to do ALC,” said Counselor Marsha Gaulke. “It’s a sure thing, you can start freshman year.”

In ALC, students stay after school and work online to recover their credits or work online at home to recover credits. The student will be orientated on how to use Moodle, a website where the curriculum is based. After the orientation, the student will be able to do their ALC work from any computer with internet access. “They can come into the lab, anytime that they want,” said Palmquist. “They can also do the work from home. They’re not required to do it anywhere.”

However, currently this system has not been serving the district well. The district’s new approach to credit recovery is to have more classes during school focused on helping students recover credits. These classes will help support different learning styles students have. “The goal is to help students before they fail,” says Schieffer.

The new credit recovery classes will have alternate methods of teaching than ALC or even conventional classes. However, because these in-school credit recovery classes won’t be fully implemented into any Minneapolis Public Schools until next year, current seniors will not be able to take advantage of this program.

Students that would be involved in the new strategies would have a class designed around them and other student’s like them. All of the classes will have the one goal in mind of making sure students make up their lost credits.

However, at South, there is already a program very similar to the new strategies that the district is aiming for. Partnership is a class that helps students regain English and Social Studies credits, serving seniors first, and then as many juniors as the class can hold.

All schools in the district have ALC, but Partnership is unique to South. Partnership allows for students to continue taking an English or Social Studies class while making up more credits for classes they have failed earlier in high school. However, there is limited room in Partnership classes, so seniors get priority.

According to senior Raekwon Hughes, Partnership is “like your average English class, but [you] have a chance to make up an extra credit as well, [they] call it a second credit.” However, before students can earn a second credit, they must meet the requirements for a first credit. In order to earn a first credit in Partnership, the students grade needs to be a C or higher, they need to have 80% attendance in the class, and have completed the writing assignment for the quarter.

While less than 25% of students earned a second credit first quarter, Hughes did not find it difficult. “As long as you keep up with your work it’ll be pretty easy,” he said.

“The idea is to change [the students’] habits of not doing assignments,” said Partnership English teacher Marcia Sutherland, explaining why there is a required writing assignment to be done.

Upon doing all their first credit work, students can then take on the extra work for a chance of getting a second credit. “You either do a test, or you just do an essay for your teacher and that’ll be it,” said Hughes.

Hughes has experienced both ALC and Partnership, and enjoyed Partnership much more. “I prefer the in-class, hands-on, doing the work with the teacher, than being online by yourself,” he said. “That way you get to learn more.”

If the credit recovery options of ALC, Partnership, or the district’s new strategies don’t appeal to a student, they can always do summer school instead. Summer school is held during the summer vacation between school years is always an option for students, as they can take up only half of their day to recover credits at school.

In the meantime, Sutherland is hopeful that the district will look to Partnership as a model for expanding credit recovery methods across the district.